Karen Barad — Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007)
Starting from Niels Bohr’s quantum mechanics — specifically the measurement problem, which shows that the apparatus of observation is not separable from what is observed — Barad develops agential realism: a unified ontology, epistemology, and ethics that refuses the separation of nature from culture, matter from meaning, and subject from object.
The central concept is intra-action rather than interaction: entities do not pre-exist their relations and then interact. Instead, they are constituted through their encounter — they emerge from “agential cuts” that temporarily stabilize phenomena into distinguishable elements. This makes ontology performative rather than representational: the world is not already divided into things that then relate; relations are primary, and things are their precipitate.
Key concepts:
- Agential realism: phenomena are the primary ontological unit; apparatuses are material-discursive practices that produce boundaries
- Discursive-material apparatuses: not merely instruments but practices that enact the objects they measure
- Diffraction: Barad’s methodological alternative to reflection — analyzing how phenomena interfere with and constitute each other
For OM: Barad’s intra-action and discursive-material apparatuses underpin field ontology method — the disposition toward interrelation, codeterminacy, and the emergence of identities through encounter rather than prior to it.